Excessive traveling

I've taken so many round trip flights this year. It's unbelievable. Let's count them:

Allerton Conference, Illinois (September)
Qualcomm research open house, San Diego (October)
MIT invited talk (November)
Joel's wedding, Oregon (December)
BYU interview (January)
Microsoft Research interview (January)
ITA, UC San Diego (February)
UCLA interview (February)
MIT and Princeton interviews (March)
Illinois visit (March)
L-3 interview, Salt Lake City (April)
Morgan Stanley interview, NYC (May)
Qualcomm interview, San Diego (May)


Comming up: Santa Barbara, Princeton, Seoul, Tokyo, Illinois, Russia.

So in one year's time I'll have flown to 20 places. (counting MIT and Princeton separately on that multi-destination trip)

Princess Puke

 

Lydia is a rough and tough, persistent, go-getter, but she's also at times a gentle, motherly girl. Here she has just set out a blanket and food on her own for a picnic in our backyard. One morning recently I came downstairs when she was the only one awake. She had the TV paused and was making breakfast. I followed her instructions to make myself a sandwich. She had out the bread, laughing-cow cheese, provolone cheese, and jam (I replaced jam with smoked salmon). Then we cut the sandwiches into fun shapes with the cookie-cutters which she had ready for us. I thought this was a fun idea she must have picked up from Larisa. Then Lydia went back to her TV, and when she unpaused it I noticed that they were making cookie-cutter sandwiches in the Curious George episode.

This week we had friends over who got the kids sick. Poor kids. Lydia threw up for several days, and apologized profusely for it. Apparently she didn't mean to. On the second night, after having eaten very little during the day, she had trouble again. She came into our room in the middle of the night and said her stomach hurt. Then she saw the bowl we had there for her during quiet time. She leaned over it and let it go. Then she stayed kneeling over the bowl for a few minutes until she finished. We felt awful, and I sat there rubbing her back and thanking her for being careful. After the last couple of dry-heaves, she abruptly stood up and started marching back to her room. I said, "Lydia, where are you going?" In a definitive voice, without turning back, she responded, "I'm done!"

Tyler speaks

 

It's suiting that Tyler would attempt to type over me while I'm trying to write an entry about him. He's sitting on my lap right now. We were just going through a counting book with him, and he's pretty good at it. Lydia is already asleep. It's rare that Tyler can flip through a book however he wants, so he's enjoying the occasion. He's pretty good at counting with us. Then he asked to count houses, so we turned to a page that has three houses and let him try counting himself: "House, three, nine." Then on to counting five snowmen: "Three, eight, nine, eight, fourteen." After that everything on the page was "fourteen." But really, eleven is his favorite.

He recently reached the point of being able to put his puzzles together very proficiently. For both Lydia and him, that came very suddenly. Just a week or two ago he had a lot of trouble.

In the car, on the way home from church, Tyler learned how to spray water on himself. We have a water spray-bottle that we use to flatten his hair. He kept spraying himself in the face and saying, "Wawa, fun!"